


Feral

by merlywhirls



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Autistic Keith, Keith-Centric, Second Person, garrison-era, mentions of suicide and suicide ideation, trans keith, trans shiro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 04:02:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11176599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merlywhirls/pseuds/merlywhirls
Summary: second person keith pov through his time at the garrison*Waking up an orphan felt very much like waking up every other morning, only it was slower and the sun yawned in your face. It takes you to the count of ten to get out of bed because any longer and you’ll cry, but any sooner you’ll throw up.Your name is Keith and you’re alone.





	Feral

Waking up an orphan felt very much like waking up every other morning, only it was slower and the sun yawned in your face. It takes you to the count of ten to get out of bed because any longer and you’ll cry, but any sooner you’ll throw up.

Your name is Keith and you’re alone.

*

Sister Helen sends you letters, but you don’t reply. You read them, sometimes once, sometimes a million times, but you never keep them, and you don’t reply. Your peers refuse to room with you after that first incident, but you don’t give a shit about that. You prefer it like this, alone, in the quiet, nothing but the burning embers of Sister Helen’s letters.

Dear Keith, they say, Dear Keith, I hope you are doing well. Be friendly to the other students.

Dear Keith, are you eating properly? I’ve sent some cookies we baked with the other children. They all miss you.

You don’t remember their names.

Dear Keith, Sister Helen writes, It’s been so long since we last heard from you. Are you well? God is watching over you, Keith, and he will protect you. We keep you in our prayers.

You can usually hear the neighbouring dorms, however, and they are loud and thumping and laughing all the time. They knock on the door sometimes, just to see if you’ll answer, so they can run away down the hall laughing all the time.

DEAR KEITH comma ARE YOU RECEIVING THESE LETTERS? THE HEADMASTER TELLS US THAT YOU ARE STILL ENROLLED. SHALL WE VISIT?

Knock knock

DEAR KEITH

Knock

*

A boy with the kindest eyes you’ve ever seen also has a smile. You don’t know what colour his eyes are, exactly, just the shape of them, the sloping outline and the thick lashes. Everything in peripheral is perfectly mapped out, cheek bones, jaw line, ears and chin. He has an Adam’s Apple and it bobs when he speaks, even though he speaks very quietly.

You know his mouth, his smile, is shy and pink but only because you have to watch his lips move with his words. He asks if he has something stuck in his teeth, and that’s when you know you’ve been staring too much.

He says, “I’ve heard very high praise about your piloting skills.”

He says, “Maybe I could watch you fly sometime.”

He says, “What do you think about that?”

You watch his lips move and his Adam’s Apple bob and you nod your head in time with it.

“Maybe you could fly with me.”

This opens a door.

*

You’re fourteen years old and ready to tear the world apart with your teeth. You’d kill for some kind of distraction, some input, some god damn sensation in your skin and ears and soul. Your very core feels wide open and empty and you’ll put anything anything anything in there, so why not blood.

Fourteen years old and have collected thirty-two teeth, twenty your own and some from the street. You put them under your pillow for extra pocket money from the Sisters and spend it on too much sugar popping in your mouth and stinging the gaping spaces in your gums.

Inside the beat up Toyota you’re fourteen years old, holding a tooth and a chunk of hair in your hand and your bag – just one bag, you only have enough stuff for one bag – sitting next to you in the back seat.

Desert flies by and it’s finally quiet.

*

You like rooftops, sure, but there’s something special about crevices hidden in wide open spaces.

A room, more like a storage closet, right across from L2 is usually vacant of people and things and it makes the perfect place to hide. There’s not a lot of light, but torches are easy to come by at the Garrison, and if not then you always have your box of matches.

You light one up, read a sentence of your book, and let it die to your fingertips. You arrive to your next class with black fingers and reeking of smoke but it just helps to keep the people away.

There’s a hidden crevice in your chest, between your third and fourth rib, and that’s where your loneliness sleeps.

*

All of your instructors tell you to fly by the book, and they don’t like it when you tell them you’ve never read it.

It’s called inter-school suspension because saying that you’re grounded is just too ridiculous. You sit in a teacher’s office and pretend to read. You don’t read out of spite.

Your instructors definitely don’t like it when you ask why. Why do you need to fly by the book? Why is what you’re doing supposedly the wrong way? Why do you get such a low score for achieving a better result than other, book-abiding students? Why don’t you just go fuck yourself?

It’s all you can think whenever you see them.

WHY DON’T YOU JUST GO FUCK YOURSELF?

WHY DON’T YOU JUST GO FUCK YOURSELF?

*

The uniform is itchy, but not unbearable, but unfortunately orange. The sleeves are too short but it had to be bought second-hand, and Sister Helen says beggars can’t be choosers. You don’t understand what that means.

The dorm is small, but not unbearable, but unfortunately occupied. His name is Art, his uniform fits, and his cheek is about two centimetres too small for your fist, so he ends up with a black eye after the third night. You only get a cut lip and one spot of blood on the floor so all things considered, you won that fight.

A beautiful boy with a kind smile dabs at your bloody lip after the floor level co-ordinator barges in to break up the fight. He has gentle fingers and gentle eyes and gentle touches, and you’ve never been handled so delicately before it almost hurts.

He asks, “What happened?”

He asks, “Did you start it?”

He asks, “What’s your name?”

You shrug, you shrug, you shrug.

*

Before – that’s the best place to start, after all, before this all went to shit, before you became alone – Before, you had a father, never a mother, but always a knife.

The tree in your backyard is hacked to pieces in unglamorous slashes, a novice hand wielding a sharp blade. It didn’t matter so long as some soul was put into the swing, a determination to cause harm, to cause destruction.

On that last day, the day ending the before – now after, on this first day of after, you carve your initials into the tree, and hide the knife up your sleeve.

K.K.

*

“Keith Kogane.” Your name sounds like a judge’s sentence in that man’s voice. The gavel that is your personal file comes down on the desk and the headmaster watches you, waits for you to flinch. You don’t.

“He’s a good boy,” Sister Helen says from beside you. “Very clever. He’ll be able to keep up with the rest of the kids, I assure you.”

Nobody wants your assurance on anything. It’s worth nothing.

“I want to believe you, Sister. But taking – taking someone like him is a huge risk. I can’t guarantee that he’d make it here.”

“But he could try.”

You don’t have to be looking at either of them to know there are daggers being thrown. You know from experience that Sister Helen doesn’t take no for an answer, but the aura surrounding the headmaster says he doesn’t like to say yes.

“We’re only interested in investing our time in students who can become the best astroexplorers of our time. Any less doesn’t cut it.”

“Who are you to say Keith is any less?”

This isn’t the real conversation that’s happening, though. You can barely hear their undertones, but it makes so much more sense.

_“We don’t want him. Take him.”_

_“We don’t want him any more than you do. Keep him.”_

You cut in.

“Can we not talk about me as if I’m not here?”

You’re fourteen years old, your face is dusty from sand blowing through the old Toyota window, and there is a tooth in your pocket.

“I will prove to you that I am perfectly capable of being one of the best – no, the best pilot in the entire Garrison. Don’t rule me out just yet!”

You get a week detention for insubordination.

*

There’s something feral in your heart and everyone can see it. It’s not soft, has claws, and moves only in leaps and bounds.

You can feel it, squirming, itching, when that frustration clouds over and all you can see is red. You can feel it when people are talking at you, when people are breathing, when people are being so god damn stupid. You can feel it during Martial Arts 101, an elective class they didn’t want you to take, and an elective class they ban you from.

You can feel it, squirming, itching, when that frustration clouds over and you can’t seem to see a thing, only a smile, only kind eyes, but it still feels so fucking feral. You can feel it when your hands’ brush, when you catch his eye while he speaks to you, when you watch his back disappear down the hall after saying good night.

*

Flying is the second most beautiful thing in the world but you refuse to admit who’s number one.

He watches you from the instructors’ balcony, through a window through your windshield through your helmet visor. You’ve never felt more exposed.

You don’t talk him through your take off because he already knows, and he knows that you know, you just have to show him how well you know. Show, don’t tell, he said that to you once and you take it and apply it to everything.

The simulator still feels real so far and you hope your imagination can keep up with your needs. You desperately crave the wind on your face, that pressure against your body p-p-pushing you, but for now this capsule feels like freedom.

You want another pressure against your body but you don’t admit it.

Eventually you forget he’s even there, it’s just you and the machine and the expanse of space projected around you. You fly through steadily, making the right choices, avoiding asteroids and making a safe landing.

On your way back you gun it, caution to the wind you can’t feel, ducking and diving between collision points and speeding through back to Earth. You hear laughter and only realise belatedly that it’s you, bouncing around your space craft as you land heavily, not ideal but with everything intact.

He’s already out of the balcony when you get out of the space craft and he raises an eyebrow at you, just one, quizzical.

“You seemed eager to get back home,” he comments, and it sounds a little surprised.

You shrug, always shrug, say, “I just wanted to go fast,” and avoid his eyes. They’re searching, you know, but not for answers, not for faults, just looking for tiny things to put away for later. You can never get used to it, the way he looks at you as if you’re worthy of his time, as if you’re important.

“You seem quite partial to barrel rolls,” he replies instead. You can hear the amusement in his voice, but then it disappears. “I don’t recommend it in official missions, however. They can go wrong very suddenly and very quickly.”

You roll your eyes. “I know, Shiro.”

*

A beautiful boy with a kind smile dabs at your bloody lip after the floor level co-ordinator barges in to break up the fight. He has gentle fingers and gentle eyes and gentle touches, and you’ve never been handled so delicately before it almost hurts.

He says his name is Takashi, but everyone calls him Shiro, so you’re expected to call him Shiro too. He wears the Garrison student uniform but he covers the slit on your lip with a balm as if it was his job. It’s nearly midnight but you’ve never felt more awake in your life.

He says, “The other guy looks a little worse for wear.”

You say, “You’re a student.”

He says, “Yes.”

He says, “I help out in the infirmary a few nights a week for my first aid certificate. It’s been very educational.”

And then you’re done and he says, “I’ll see you next time.”

You don’t like his knowing look.

*

The last good night is the hardest and you don’t want to watch his back this time. You can’t bear it, you can never bear it but tonight your feral heart is unshackled and mauling.

You grab him and you kiss him, you kiss him you kiss him you kiss him and God it’s so beautiful because he’s kissing you back and gripping your chin, keeping you steady, keeping you still. Both of your feral hearts’ beat in time at this last fight, the last good night, for a year.

You want to keep kissing him until you run out of tears but he won’t let you go that far, asks you to keep them for when he comes back. He promises, always promises, that he’ll come back, and you believe him, and kiss him one last time.

One last time.

*

You can say whatever you like in here, it won’t be repeated.

Unless you say you’re going to hurt yourself, then it will be repeated, and repeated and repeated, until the right person is found to make you cut that out.

There’s nothing between your chair and her’s, it’s an open space, you don’t open your mouth. She talks you through the protocol, the legal obligations she has, the terms of your contract. She says that Sister Helen says that you have problems with anger and you have problems with socialising with your peers and you have problems up to your ears but boy can you fly. Do you like to fly, Keith? Her voice is neutral and way too fucking nice.

A psychologist was not what you agreed to, but it’s what Sister Helen agreed to. She should be here answering these stupid questions, you think, but you also know that without this arrangement then you would never fly. Do you like to fly, Keith?

Yes. Yes you do.

*

Fists UP, stance LOWERED, feet APART. Watch out for your blind spot. Watch out for your opponent’s blind spot. Don’t stand stock still, light on your feet, keep ‘em moving and keep ‘em guessing. Don’t let your opponent read you. Read your opponent. Watch their feints. Make convincing feints yourself.

Remember all this and more in the middle of a crash of adrenaline. Remember all this and more when you’re up against a beautiful boy with hair sticking to his forehead.

Try to concentrate on his stance instead of his arms as he says, “Watch what your opponent is planning to do.”

His punches are lightning quick but soft on your body. He doesn’t want to hurt you, you don’t want to hurt him, so there’s always a pull back, always a wall of softness between the two of you. His hands are all over you but not in the right way.

Try to watch out for his feints instead of the closeness of his body as he says, “Formulate an attack around your opponent’s shortcomings.”

He’s so close, too close, not close enough. You can’t feel his breath but you can hear it ragged in his lungs, can’t feel his skin but can feel the heat radiating off him. When he flicks his hair out of his eyes a drop of sweat hits your cheek, and his laugh is breathless as he apologises. You rub your face with your shoulder, not shifting your stance, still so close to him.

Try, just try, to do anything but stare at him with your mouth gaping open as he finally says, “Patience yields focus.”

*

Dad took you to the science museum once and you’ve been there fifty-seven times since. Kids under twelve get in for free and kids with a lock pick do too. That first time you held onto Dad’s hand real tight until you reached the space exploration exhibit, then you lost him for three hours and ignored the overhead announcements calling your name. You scare the other kids out of the small spaceship simulator so you have a turn, again and again and again, making your own sound effects as you navigate through imaginary space.

The Sisters take you there too, in the After, and can barely believe what they’re seeing when you get in the simulator. The top ten high scores on clearing the sim safely all belong to KK_ and you just beat his highest score. Your high score.

The Sisters are more than happy to let you sit in the observation room for a few hours, watching the projected stars, while they take the rest of the kids out for lunch. It’s always so much easier for them when you decide to sit still, not interact with the other kids, and mind your own business. You’re less aggressive, less obtrusive, less everything that they hate about raising you.

So you watch the stars and play in the simulator until you can do the real thing.

*

Everyone knows Shirogane Takashi’s name except you. You know his name, sure, but you don’t really know what it means, what it evokes in lecturers and teachers, why it excites the other students. The first time you hear someone talk about him you furrow your brow, forgetting that you do everything in your power to ignore your peers, and ask, “That guy in the infirmary?”

The kid that had been talking a mile a minute suddenly stops and looks at you as if you’re an alien. Sometimes you wonder that yourself.

“What are you talking about?!” the other kid exclaims. “Shiro is the greatest pilot the Garrison has ever seen! They offered to graduate him early, but he refused. Now he’ll sometimes sit in on first year classes to give assistance! Do you think he’ll do that for us? God, if I got to meet Shiro I’d probably die…”

The other kid keeps talking, all limbs and sound, but you tune him out again.

Your teachers tell you that your flying is reckless but naturally brilliant. They say they’ve only seen this kind of intuition from one other person in the Garrison, and the whole class gasps as they say Shiro’s name. You still don’t get it, not really, because Shiro wasn’t all that awe inspiring, just a kind boy with a beautiful smile and steady hands.

Nothing special at all.

*

You’re out with Sister Margaret this time and she’s your least favourite Sister. You’re eleven years old but she holds your hand, dry as paper and wrinkled. She threads your fingers together so it’s harder for you to slip out of her hold, so instead you refuse to walk, letting her drag you through the streets.

When she dislocates your shoulder you barely make a sound.

The doctor’s waiting room is full of toys and books that she won’t let you touch. She keeps you seated beside her, hands still clasped together, as she whispers furiously in your ear.

“Look at the doctor when he speaks to you,” she says. You try to nudge away but her head follows. “And remember your manners. Good morning, thank you, have a good day. Remember, Keith? Say it back to me.”

It’s a check up but Sister Margaret has an obsession, a line of inquiry that’s plagued her since you arrived at her orphanage. She holds fast to that idea as the doctor pulls your shirt over your head, talking about you like you’re not there. You’re never there.

“He’s far too angry for a normal child,” Sister Margaret insists.

The doctor nods and prods at your shoulder. You don’t make a sound. You’re not there.

“And usually he’ll ignore us. We’ll be calling his name and he can hear us, alright, but he won’t respond. He’ll barely look us in the eye. Keith. Hey, Keith, look at me, please. See?”

The doctor pops your shoulder back in place. He listens to your heart.

“He barely speaks. Not to us nor the other kids, but not because he can’t. Because sometimes when he does speak it’s always about space, space this and space that, and we can’t get him to stop.”

He looks down your throat and tells you to say ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

“Are you sure this doesn’t have anything to do with, you know… the gender thing? Last time you said it wasn’t a condition we should worry about but Keith isn’t… he’s not…”

He takes your blood pressure and it’s steadily rising.

“Sister, I can assure you,” the doctor says as he pulls away from you, “Keith is completely normal. He’s just different from the other children and you’re not used to it. Treat Keith how Keith needs to be treated and he’ll be perfectly happy.”

Sister Margaret doesn’t like this answer, you can tell, her mouth is thin and pressed tightly and you don’t want to see the fire in her eyes. But the doctor turns back to you and he speaks to you and he asks, “Do you need another prescription for hormone blockers?” And he pretends Sister Margaret isn’t there.

You get a prescription and a lollipop and an angry Sister but also an ally in a strange old doctor.

*

Shiro’s hands shake as he hands you the paper. You don’t understand what the big deal is, the graduation ceremony is compulsory for all Garrison students, but Shiro smiles at the ground as his hands shake and he hands you the paper.

You’ve been INVITED to ATTEND the end of year Garrison BANQUET and GRADUATION CEREMONY. You need to RSVP by the end of the WEEK to secure your spot.

You tell him, “I already have a spot.”

He tells you, “No. Not quite.”

You’ve never been on the ground floor of the ballroom before, always reserved for family and friends of the graduates. Shiro steers you through the crowd to the table at the front, closest to the stage, his ears slightly pink but his smile in tact. The balcony above is nothing but shouts and mess of orange-grey student uniforms. He introduces you to the family at the table but you immediately forget their names, forget their faces as soon as Shiro’s guiding hand on your shoulder leaves and he turns to exit the ballroom.

You tell him, “Good luck.”

He tells you, “You too.”

*

The sting in your knuckles is familiar and comforting. So are the kind eyes of a beautiful boy who holds your hand and wraps you up.

You can finally look at his eyes when they’re not trained on you, dark brown and warm, so soft, like the look he shoots you when you wince against the pain. Like the tone of his voice when he says, “What happened this time?”

Before him were screams and shouts, Sisters’ shrill voices and the commands of his superior officers: What did you do this time?

What happened and what you did are two very distinct things.

But you don’t answer, because no one has ever asked, and not even a beautiful boy can fish that out of you so quickly.

Maybe next time.

*

Your binder has never been so suffocating than when you are under water, drowning.

Figuratively, you’re always drowning, always suffocating, but not even the cold tiles under your feet can ground you this time. You were assured safety but this felt like being thrown to the sharks and you are tired, so tired, so tired, so tired, so tired so tired so tired so tired so tir

They have to scoop you out of the water but you don’t give them a chance to mouth-to-mouth. You cough and swear in their face and pretend you’re not crying.

The Zero-G pool simulation was a success alright, you felt weightless, you felt nothing, but you still had to come back to the earth in the end.

The other kids don’t really know what to make of it other than Keith can’t swim but your psychologist calls Sister Helen and they watch you sleep for a week.

*

He looks so good standing up there in the official Garrison uniform that you temporarily forget you hate him for leaving you.

The forgetful names and faces at your table shout and cheer when he accepts his certificate, but no one is happier than you.

You hate him and you love him and instead of tearing you apart it feels like a hole patched up. There’s a recognisable sting in your hands but its from clapping so hard and fast you forget if you even clapped in the first place. So you clap again.

He’s Takashi fucking Shirogane, but he’s still nervous when he makes his Valedictorian speech. You already have it memorised, evenings spent in your dorm listening to him practice and practice until his voice went hoarse.

He does now what he did then: looks at you at certain key parts, with the support of family and friends, but this time at the end he winks at you before he takes a bow.

So you clap again.

*

You break everything.

A television, an office, three desks and every knuckle. There’s blood all over the walls of your dorm room but luckily it’s just yours this time. They don’t try to restain you until you reach the Headmaster’s office and sock him in the eye.

_“Why didn’t you tell me?”_

You’re passed the stage of shaking rage. Your arms are steady and true, lightning fast and tearing things up. You want to bash your head against the wall, over and over and over and over until this is all fixed. Your fingers are too broken and weak for you to tear open your ribcage, pick off all your bones and release this giant wave of grief that fills you up. You stopped vomiting hours ago, nothing left to bring up, so now all you do is shout and break and repeat.

The Garrison goes into lockdown because of you, but you barely notice. You think you could die from this heartbreak and the only reason why you leave is because your broken hands are cuffed behind your back.

You spend the overnight police visit in a cell crying.

_“Why would you need to know?”_

You are broken everything.

*

You border between saying nothing and saying everything. You mix up which is meant to be appropriate.

You tell him nothing of your feelings for him until the last possible minute, but you tell him everything he probably already knows about space and the universe around you. You say nothing of the feralness of your heart but that you once picked a fight with a man with a knife just so you could hear the slice of the air as the blade narrowly missed your ear. You say nothing of the chains and weights tied to your feet but everything about wanting to sink to the bottom of that pool.

You say nothing as he shows you his scars, his small bottle of medicine, not out of sympathy or pity or any of those things you can’t stand, but out of understanding. You say nothing as he takes his shirt off and shows you his equally compressed chest. You say nothing when the most beautiful boy you have ever seen says, “We are the same,” because you don’t want to believe that maybe you’re not ugly after all. Not yet, not now, not while everything still looks vaguely obscured by a dark veil.

You say nothing and wait for him to leave you alone in that small first aid room, practically a second home, your resting cell for the next week.

*

The Sisters sit you down. Sister Helen passed on last year, God rest her soul, and Sister Margaret has been in hospital for a few months now for some illness only God can cure, so it’s two faces you’ve never seen before sitting you down and smiling.

You turned eighteen yesterday. At 12:01pm you got a Skype call and a sleepy Shiro crooning Happy Birthday to you. He’s in the middle of outer space, undertaking a journey the first of its kind, but he uses Garrison resources to call you in the middle of the night and sing.

He also laughs when you say, “You’re a minute late,” and you both talk until you fall asleep.

Sister Carol and Sister Mary smile and smile and smile and don’t stop smiling until they reach the point.

“You’re legally an adult now, Keith,” Sister Carol says gently. It’s a contradiction, you feel, to be legally an adult and spoken to like a child.

“You are no longer a ward of the state,” Sister Mary continues.

“You can come to us if you ever need us, but legally, you are no longer in our care,” Sister Carol finishes.

Goodbye, they are saying, Good riddance.

You finally smile too.

*

You say nothing, absolutely nothing, for 173 hours, until you find him in a sports bra in the gym doing pull ups.

(sister helen asks and asks and asks in a never ending torment are you okay keith? do you want to talk about it keith? god is always here to help you keith keith keith are you listening to me keith keith please look at me when im speaking to you what are you thinking? we can never tell what you are thinking you need to speak to us more keith keith why did you get into the pool)

He says, “Keith.”

And even this boy with a kind heart a kind smile kind eyes and kind hands holds his arms over his chest protectively and angles away from you shyly, that even this boy who is perfect in almost every impossible way would show and hide himself at the same time is something that gnaws at you and so you say,

“We are the same.”

*

No one tells you. You read it off a screen.

The picture they show on the news looks like him, but it’s not how you remember him. It’s stoic, military, nothing like the reality of his lopsided smile and crinkling eyes. That’s the Shiro you remember.

So it’s reasonable to say that this Shiro on the screen was not yours. The words printed beneath his picture were unassociated with the Shiro you held in your heart and waited for.

You remember the Shiro who helped you with your homework, who defended you to your teachers, who listened indulgently when you talked about nonsense. You remember Shiro in snapshots: the look of concern the first time you met him in the first aid room; his proud smile on stage as he graduated; his tired eyes when you woke up from your concussion, going too hard on the hover scooter.

That’s not the Shiro that’s on TV because that Shiro is reported DEAD and your Shiro is still very much alive in your mind. Your Shiro is returning to Earth in a few months and you can’t wait to hold him properly. You stay up at night thinking about it, the day he returns, looking exhausted but proud, still in his space gear as you run to him. You know you won’t be able to stop yourself, you run to him and cling to him and you tell yourself that in this fantasy, you don’t care who’s watching, even though it’s probably the whole world.

The whole world is watching this broadcast (DEAD) and you throw up in a bin.

*

You grab him and you kiss him, you kiss him you kiss him you kiss him and God it’s so beautiful because he’s kissing you back and gripping your chin, keeping you steady, keeping you still. You want to keep kissing him until you run out of tears but he won’t let you go that far, asks you to keep them for when he comes back. He promises, always promises, that he’ll come back, and you believe him, always believe him, and kiss him one last time.

One last time.

*

Sister Helen doesn’t send you letters anymore, only the state government. Your outstanding fine for assault in slowly trickling, but not quickly enough to make you feel unburdened. All you have is a shack, a bike, and debt.

And Voltron. You don’t know what it is but it’s interesting enough to investigate when you’re not delivering pizzas, enough of a distraction so as to not completely split in two. You listen to the hums of the desert landscape and watch the skies for a lost memory, waiting for it to crash to earth.

Every time you think about it your heart races like it used to in your first year at the Garrison, a pulsing anxiety that spreads like poison. Reminders of the Garrison don’t help, and you need to take ten minutes to calm your breathing, looking out over the desert horizon, but never higher. The night sky is cursed and endless and you’re scared of getting stuck in it forever.

And when the hums become too much, become rapid and overwhelming and urgent, you don’t hesitate to jump onto your stolen bike, you don’t hesitate to dive head first into an adventure that could kill you.

You were already dead.

**Author's Note:**

> this has been a wip for ages and finally decided to get rid of it bc i actually kinda like it. let me know if its too hard to follow but keep in mind the formatting style.
> 
> keith is autistic and you can fight me about it.


End file.
